This book represents a significant contribution to academic knowledge, making a compelling case for a contemporary analytical re-reading of a number of core postcolonial women's narratives, such as Erna Brodber's Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood, and Mariama Ba's So Long a Letter. These narratives highlight diversity, contextuality, opposition, and metachrony, have a generative literary function, and anticipate what have now become postcolonial feminist issues and debates. Bringing together feminist writing from a range of postcolonial contexts, the book contributes to a field represented by the critical writings of Francoise Lionnet, Ketu Katrak, and Elleke Boehmer, among others. The deconstructive, cultural approach of the book is mobilised to support an in-depth literary analysis which focuses on female oppression, difference, voice, and agency. Questions of what it means to be a woman and to be postcolonial are read as central debates which emphasise multi-vocal and multi-focal female narratives and perspectives. That is, they highlight the temporal, as well as cross-cultural links and implications of the selected narratives, which give the project a kind of positive complexity and linkage. Above all, the analysis of several unconventional modes and (physical/imaginative) spaces of female resistance, such as prison, widow confinement, and madness, yields some surprising results that are sustained by a close reading of the texts which are not only attentive to questions of genre, structure, imagery and narrative endings, but also oppositional, instructive and reconstructive.
About the Author: Dr. Kinana Hamam is a researcher in postcolonial studies and English literature, with a focus on postcolonial women's writing. Dr. Hamam holds a PhD in Critical Theory (2013) and an MA in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies (2008), both awarded by the University of Nottingham. Hamam has also been an accredited bilingual translator/interpreter of English-Arabic since 2008, and has worked as a full-time Lecturer of English Language and Literature in Syria since 2004. Her research interests include postcolonial cultural studies, especially postcolonial women's writing which foregrounds a metachronous discourse of literary-spatial mapping and transformation; the study of female subalternity and difference in relation to deconstruction and contextuality; and the intersectionality of gender identity, voice, and language in postcolonial (con)texts.